Journal of World History, vol. 22, no. 2 (2011)

ARTICLES

This article describes the ways elites in Madagascar benefited from interactions with European and American pirates during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Malagasy leaders expanded their knowledge of global patterns of exchange and used this knowledge to monopolize trade from the island. At the time, the identification and suppression of pirates became a conflict between trade systems in and around the island. The states formed by Malagasy elites challenged British and French influence in the southwestern Indian Ocean and came under attack during the nineteenth century, a period of expanding European power in the region.

Following the considerable increase in the interactions between Ottomans and Europeans, Ottoman port cities, referred to here as “borderlands,” became meeting places of distinct worlds. Ottoman and British people met, clashed, and grappled with each other in the borderlands of the Ottoman Empire. There was unbalanced, disparate, and disproportionate, but also mutual and constant interchange between the two societies. This article discusses one facet of this interchange: the Anglo-Ottoman exchange of women’s costumes.

This article explains the destruction of the Yuanmingyuan, the imperial palace compound located northwest of Beijing, by an Anglo-French army in 1860. Bracketing the political and military context, it looks at the ways the emperor’s palace has been interpreted in European cultural history and the ways it was understood by the people responsible for its destruction. To Europeans, the Yuanmingyuan was a place of wonder, and it was more than anything the transformation of the language of wonder that made the palace vulnerable to European aggression. Intercultural aesthetic judgments, the article concludes, always have political implications.

Rudyard Kipling and Edward Said are influential figures in reconstructing Western attitudes to the East. Kipling’s comments on the “East” outside India, however, show a different picture from Said’s Orientalism paradigm of negative portrayals of the Orient, which included Kipling as a typical Orientalist supremacist. Kipling emphasized threats from China rather than from the Muslim world. Kipling also had a range of positive comments on Burma, Japan, and Tibet, reflecting a common Buddhist substratum that Kipling seems to have appreciated. Consequently, both the perception of Kipling and the application of Said’s paradigm need adjustment and reorientation.

This study shows how the international efforts for reforming history teaching, by the League of Nations, UNESCO, and the Council of Europe, were both neglected and implemented before and after World War II. International interest in the promotion of international understanding and discouragement of nationalism was interpreted and influenced by teachers’ and students’ views of history. International understanding and non-European history—but not intercultural history—became a dominant theme in the Swedish curriculum in a complex top-down and bottom-up process.